"War and Peace" is over fourteen hundred pages long. This review will be short. It's been called the greatest novel ever written. Maybe. Some authors still find inspiration from it. I can see that. I, who knew nothing but the obvious about it, found myself reading a satire. For about at least twelve hundred of the fourteen hundred pages all main characters are weak, selfish, gullible, conniving, lustful, obsessed, superstitious, fearful, tyrannical, too rich, too lazy, too vain, gossips, and incapable of financial management. Their serfs, of which they have thousands, have no voice or presence. We move back and forth between the pure soap of parties and alliances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the front where Napoleon manages to reach Moscow, only to retreat in defeat. The history lesson is great, but Tolstoy spends a lot of time musing about the meaning of it all, and he certainly could have used an editor. Ideas tend to be repeated within the same paragraph. In the end, when through hardship the protagonists realize the error of their ways, they still remain a hugely rich family, as self-involved as before and either ignorant or paternalistic to the people they own. While some find inspiration in it (did I say that before?), from the disorganization of war to the commonalities of peace among the aristocracy, "War and Peace" is showing signs of age
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I'll leave it here today. My notes on "The Kindly Ones" will follow later. I don't see you running to the store to get either book, anyway. In the meantime, I will try another one of your yummy looking recipes.
